Buyer's guide
It is the first question a business owner asks, and the worst served on the web: pricing grids that match nobody, or total silence until the meeting. This page does the opposite. It explains what you are buying, the seven factors that actually move the amount, what is never included in a plan, and how to estimate your own budget before you even talk to us.
Managed IT services are billed per managed workstation or server, monthly. The amount depends on seven factors: the number of machines, the service level, the age of the fleet, your compliance obligations, your working hours, the number of sites, and your line-of-business software. Hardware and licences stay separate expenses.
What you are buying
Paying for IT by the hour funds repairs. Paying a monthly plan funds the repair not happening. The cost difference between the two models does not show up on an invoice: it shows up over a full year, downtime included.
The monthly amount covers recurring service: monitoring workstations and servers, applying patches, verifying backups, protecting against ransomware and, depending on the level, a help desk for your staff and planning support.
It does not cover what you buy: machines, vendor licences, one-off projects. That boundary is the source of almost every bad surprise between a small business and its provider, which is why it deserves to be written down before signing. Here is how we build a quote.
The seven factors
Two companies with fifteen employees can receive very different quotes. Here is why, and what you can check yourself before asking for a price.
This is the base of the calculation. Billing is per managed workstation or server, never per user: one person with a laptop and a desktop counts as two units, two people sharing one machine count as one.
A server needs more monitoring than a workstation, so it weighs more in the total.
Check this yourself. Count your powered-on machines, not your employees. That number drives everything else.
Monitoring a fleet, answering your employees' calls, and guaranteeing a response time in writing are three different commitments, and they do not cost the same.
Each level contains the previous one in full, so the price moves in steps rather than through stacked options.
Check this yourself. Ask yourself whether you need a help desk for your staff, or only monitoring that protects your data.
A fleet of eight-year-old machines with missing updates and overdue patches takes more hours in the first months than a recent, clean one.
That extra cost is temporary, but it is real, and an honest provider names it instead of absorbing it quietly and billing it back another way.
Check this yourself. Look at the average age of your workstations and the last reboot date of your servers.
Quebec's Law 25 requires specific measures: an incident register, access management, logging, and rules for sending data outside Quebec. Some industries add their own requirements.
Those measures need tooling and follow-up time, and both show up in the price.
Check this yourself. If your insurer sent you a cyber insurance questionnaire, its questions already outline your required level.
Covering evening shifts, a weekend, or a plant that runs overnight does not cost the same as covering office hours.
It is not the number of calls that changes, it is the availability you have to fund even when nothing happens.
Check this yourself. Note when your first employee signs in and when your last one shuts down.
One office, three branches, and a remote team do not require the same network work, the same links between sites, or the same physical presence.
Distance is not paid every day. It is paid the day someone has to be on site.
Check this yourself. List your addresses, then ask where the person who would travel to you starts from.
An accounting system hosted by a third party, a production system, an in-house application: each one adds a piece to understand, monitor, and connect to the rest.
This is often what separates two quotes that looked comparable on workstation count alone.
Check this yourself. Write down your essential software. A small business almost always has more of it than it thinks.
The boundary
A serious provider draws this line before signing, in writing, and sticks to it. Here is ours.
The rule is easy to remember: the plan covers service, not goods. Anything that becomes your property, you buy. Anything that is recurring work is already paid for by the monthly amount.
An exceptional project, such as a server migration or an office move, sits outside the plan and is quoted separately. That is normal, as long as it is announced beforehand rather than discovered on the invoice.
Comparison
A monthly plan is not always the right answer. Here are the three models, with what each one gives, what it truly costs, and who it suits.
You call a technician when the problem happens and pay for the time spent.
What it gives. No monthly commitment, and you only pay for what you use.
What it really costs. The cost is unpredictable and always lands at the worst moment. Nobody watches between two calls, so problems get solved after the fact rather than before. Nobody verifies your backups.
Who it suits. A very small fleet, little dependence on IT, and a real tolerance for downtime.
You hire an IT person who works for you alone.
What it gives. Daily presence, deep knowledge of your specifics, and an immediate answer on site.
What it really costs. A salary, benefits, and ongoing training. One person covers neither vacation, nor sick days, nor nights, and their departure often takes the memory of your decisions with them. Keeping up with cybersecurity alone is hard.
Who it suits. An organization large enough to keep the person busy full time and to absorb their absence.
A provider takes on monitoring, support, security, and planning for an amount you know in advance.
What it gives. A predictable expense, a team rather than a person, continuous monitoring, and verified backups. Cybersecurity and compliance are part of the service.
What it really costs. A monthly commitment, including the months when nothing breaks. You have to accept working with processes that are not your own.
Who it suits. Most small and mid-sized businesses whose operations stop when IT stops.
Method
You can do this on your own, in an hour, and walk into the meeting with the right numbers. It holds even if you do not choose OKTO Solutions.
Questions and answers
Give us your workstation and server count, your working hours, and your essential software. We quote from your actual fleet, and we tell you plainly if another model would suit you better.
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